Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel Book 4)

by Alison Kent

  “And come September?” Jean asked. “You’re not going to miss those cherubic little faces looking up and hanging on your every word?”

  Brooklyn thought about Adrianne Drake. And then, because she’d ridden behind him, and he’d given her chocolate, and he’d drunk espresso in her kitchen, holding the tiny cup with his large-boned hands, she thought about Callum Drake, too.

  Teaching next year in Hope Springs would mean seeing Adrianne in the hallways and the cafeteria and on the playground, and wondering what had become of her father. “I will. But I’ll have plenty of memories to look back on. And I owe Artie so much for making sure I’d be well taken care of monetarily.”

  “He was a good man, your Artie,” Jean said, pointing at Brooklyn with her spoon instead of a finger. “And a good neighbor, checking the fluids in my car every weekend, as if I didn’t know how to do it myself. Asking about the lawn any time my service was late. You remember that day Maxine came by, and you and Artie were outside, and he heard that noise under her hood? He took a look and saved her a small fortune by catching whatever was going wrong before it did.”

  The memory had Brooklyn smiling. Seemed like it had been an oil leak. “He liked taking care of things. Taking care of people.”

  “That’s part of what made him so good at his job,” Jean said, her gaze drawn to the photos of split-rail fences crossing pastures and prairies framed on the room’s green pinstriped walls. “It’s hard to believe the opening of this place was delayed so long because of a fire. I think about that and Artie every time I come here. Such a tragedy. Such a loss.”

  Her gaze on her plate, Brooklyn stilled. She knew the story of the house’s third-floor turret having to be rebuilt after an electrical fire. But unlike Jean, she never thought about the fire when she came here. She did her best not to think about fires at all. As much as she’d loved reading to the crackle of flames in the fireplace at home, she hadn’t used it since Artie’s death, giving away the wood stacked on the patio and never buying more.

  “It’s okay that it still bothers you,” she heard Jean saying. “To think about the fire. I can’t pass an accident on the freeway without thinking about Curtis and his mangled car, and nearly losing my ability to breathe.”

  Bother. That hardly seemed a strong enough word. “Yes, but I feel like it’s been long enough that I should have moved on.”

  Jean set down her spoon, and propped her elbows on the table, her fingers steepled below her sharp gaze, her bracelets tinkling against her watch face. “Why haven’t you? I’m not saying you should have. Lord knows I’m not much of an example of how to get on with things, but maybe if you can put a name to why you’re hanging on, you’ll be able to let go.”

  Artie sharing his life with her had been everything that made their marriage fun. Except for going their own way for work, they’d been inseparable. When one cooked, the other came behind and cleaned. While one swabbed the toilet, the other took care of the tub. Brooklyn had weeded the flower beds while Artie had mowed. He’d moved the groceries from the car to the counter. She’d moved the groceries from the counter to the shelves.

  They’d spent their days off together, even when that meant browsing different sections of the same bookstore, or one trying on clothes while the other waited outside the dressing room. Brooklyn buying new sheets and towels while Artie hit the hardware store. Meeting at the car loaded down with bags and heading for lunch, his shopping story turning into a whale of a tale between bites of his food. She’d be laughing until she couldn’t breathe.

  And there it was. She’d been without Artie for two long years, yet she’d kept his memory alive because she didn’t know how to be alone. She gone from living with her parents until she’d finished grad school, to marrying Artie and living with him.

  Was it any wonder she hadn’t let go? She had no one else to hold on to, and wasn’t sure her own two feet were steady. Sighing, she reached for her glass of iced tea. “Maybe I’m just not ready.”

  “I’d say the fact that you’re going through and decluttering is a good sign you are.”

  “How did you know when you were ready?”

  “Oh, honey. I’m still not. But I’m seventy-three years old. I was sixty when Curtis passed. I had forty years with the man in the flesh. Now he’s with me in spirit. And I’m happy about that.”

  “You don’t get lonely?”

  “I have three children, six grandchildren. I have Maxine, Peggy, and Pearl. And I have you,” she said, and Brooklyn’s eyes threatened to sting. “I wasn’t interested in marrying again. And though I enjoyed sharing Curtis’s bed all those years, I wasn’t terribly interested in sex after he died. Companionship, yes. I missed that. I still do. But I invite Alva Bean over for dinner every so often. He lost his wife four years ago. It’s good for the both of us. Connecting. Laughing. But I’m too set in my ways for romance. You, on the other hand . . .”

  “Oh, no. I’m just as set in my ways as you are.” I’m completely dull and boring. Just wait and ask my future cats.

  “But you are still interested in sex, I hope.”

  Brooklyn nearly sputtered her casserole. “I’m not ready to write off the possibility.” And with that came thoughts of Callum again. Not Artie, whom she’d loved with her body as well as her heart and her mind, but Callum, after whom she lusted. “Actually, I did meet a man—”

  “The one with the motorcycle?”

  Jean was not a nosy neighbor, but Callum did ride a Harley. “You heard that, did you?”

  “Hard not to.”

  “He followed me home from school to make sure I got there safely. Then he came in for a cup of coffee. That was it.”

  “I hope that was it,” Jean said with a snort. “I heard him arrive, then heard him leave. He wasn’t inside long enough for sex worth calling good.”

  “Jean!” Brooklyn laughed, but still her cheeks heated.

  “Seventy-three years old, remember? I get to say what I think. Now, what’s his name?”

  Brooklyn hesitated; Jean had just made it clear how she felt about his mother. “His name is Callum. His daughter’s in my class.”

  “So a little after-hours parent-teacher conference?” Jean asked, chuckling as she moved aside her empty dessert plate and reached for her chicken spaghetti. Then she stopped and looked up, frowning. “Wait a minute. Callum. Do you mean Callum Drake? Shirley’s son? The chocolatier?”

  The heat blooming across her collarbone, Brooklyn nodded. “He came to class for story hour yesterday. Then he showed me his shop.”

  Jean considered her food. “I’m trying to remember if there was ever a father of a student I wanted to bring home. Of course, I was married all that time,” she added, twirling a fork into the spaghetti. “I don’t think Curtis would’ve liked very much me doing so.”

  Trying not to choke on the iced tea she’d just swallowed, Brooklyn said, “And this is why I will never give up having lunches with you, Mrs. Dial. It’s like a meal and a show all in one.”

  But Jean’s mind was elsewhere. “Do you know that young man’s story? Why he’s in Hope Springs? Why he’s the one with custody of his little girl?”

  “No,” Brooklyn said, cutting into her enchilada. “We only met yesterday. And we talked mostly about his work and his daughter. A bit about his parents. I told him about Artie.”

  Jean arched a brow. “That’s a lot of talk for a first date.”

  Brooklyn looked down at her plate with a quiet smile. “It wasn’t a date. But no. I don’t know his story. And I don’t need to know.” Though she was so very interested. “I assume he has one. Fathers don’t usually get full custody.”

  “Shirley gives his history a sordid spin, but she does that with everything, so I’m not sure how much of what she says I believe. And I won’t repeat any of the tales she’s told at Pearl’s because who knows if they’re true. But I will say this.”

  Leaning forward, Jean covered Brooklyn’s hand with he
r own and gave it a pat, her watch face slipping to the side of her wrist. “As good a man as your Artie was? From the facts I know to be true, not the ones embellished by his mother, Callum Drake is equally so.”

  Later that night found Brooklyn stuffed with brownies and thinking about good men. Not all the good men she’d known in her life, but Artie. And Callum. And her father, who’d loved her mother dearly, but had been clueless when it came to seeing where she needed help. Leaving her to the dinner dishes while he retired with a scientific journal didn’t make him a bad man. Especially since Brooklyn had seen him pitch in when asked. But he had to be asked. For whatever reason, helping never occurred to him otherwise.

  He’d been an academic, he and her mother both, which made Brooklyn’s choice of profession somewhat fated. Theirs had been a house of learning: documentaries and discussion, books and brainstorming. Very little of what she’d read or watched had been for fun. Fun, her father said, was in thinking through puzzles, in solving problems strategically, in knowing things few others did. Even so, it wasn’t about being smarter. Their family, he’d told her, simply used their minds more judiciously.

  Artie had made her see fun differently. No. Artie had introduced her to fun. It hadn’t made her think less of her father; it had made her appreciate Artie’s love of life more. He’d had street smarts, and a four-year degree, and the sort of empathy her father didn’t understand because her father read pages, not people.

  And though she laughed at her susceptibility to the pull of the superficial, she couldn’t deny the attraction of Artie’s tattoos.

  He’d had the most amazing series of firefighting tats on both arms and shoulders, and across his upper back. Helmets and hoses. Ladders and axes. Flags and eagles, and dates he never wanted to forget. Sadly, he’d lost a comrade during their eighth year of marriage; she’d gone with him when he’d added that one framed in a helmet shield.

  Jean was right when she’d said Artie’s need to take care of people had made him good at his job. That same compassion had been a big part of the reason she’d fallen in love with him. They’d met at a Labor Day barbecue thrown by his station’s firefighters and their wives. Artie had been single, and Brooklyn the guest of a girlfriend whose brother worked Artie’s same shift.

  The brother had decided to play matchmaker. His matchmaking had worked. Brooklyn had been dazzled, swept off her feet. Artie had made sure she had enough to eat, that she was never without something to drink, that she met all of his friends and their families. That she learned everything about him time allowed. That he learned everything about her she was willing to share. That he had her number and her permission to call. He wanted to get together.

  Oh, the memories, she mused, opening the hope chest at the foot of her bed and sitting on the floor in front of it. Thinking back to those early days never failed to bring on the tears. Sad tears, yes, but joyful ones, too. He’d been amazing. One of a kind. At least to her, coming from the world of academics, and she’d fallen hard.

  The life of the party, her Artie. The jester. Always with a comeback, but never insulting or at another’s expense. He’d been a big, bright light, and he’d shone down on her days, which were filled with term papers and textbooks, her nights, too. Her whole life, really. She could’ve majored in dull and boring. Until Artie had come along and saved her from herself. And from cats.

  What he’d seen in her . . . it had taken her a long time to make sense of it. How he’d needed her quiet nature. They shouldn’t have fit together; their personalities couldn’t have been more dissimilar, their interests more diverse. Yet each brought to the relationship what the other was lacking, whether due to nurture or nature or something else. As much as she’d wanted to get to the bottom of their attraction, she’d finally managed to stop analyzing and simply enjoyed.

  Later, she’d realized his clowning was a crutch. He’d used it to get through the dark side of his work, to take his mind off the destruction, the devastation, the loss; how could she blame him? She would never have been able to cope with the things he carried with him. Laughter, she supposed, was a better way to shore up his courage than drinking or drugs. That didn’t make it any less addictive, or keep her from worrying when she found him in tears.

  Shaking off the memories, she peered into the hope chest, trying to decide if she was up for more sorting and culling and packing tonight. She thought of Jean, living in the same place as long as she had. Brooklyn would’ve been only a year younger than Adrianne Drake when the Dials bought the house next door.

  Of course, thinking of Adrianne had her thinking of Callum. On a regular Friday, Bliss would be closed by now, but with tomorrow being Valentine’s Day, Adrianne would be with her grandparents while he worked late.

  She wondered how many of his temp staff stayed late. Wondered, too, if Lena did. Then she reached into the hope chest for a stack of folders—she used the chest as a file cabinet for paperwork, storing tax records instead of her dreams—because what Lena and Callum did was not her business. And why she was even thinking there might be something between them, when neither had given off anything but an employer-employee vibe . . .

  Enough. She had an entire house to organize and no time to moon over Callum Drake. Deciding to go through the files at the kitchen table, she grabbed the chest’s lid to lower it, frowning as she caught sight of a sheet of paper stuck between the interior and its recessed tray. She tugged on the tray’s hinges, then just sat there, staring.

  How in the world had she forgotten tucking away the folder with all of her Cinque Terre notes? The ones she’d made after talking to Bianca, Artie’s cousin who lived in Vernazza? Especially when the contents had played a vital role in her tendering her resignation after teaching for twelve years. She thought back to last summer . . .

  She’d run out of shelf space on her living room’s bookcases, and the books in her bedroom had become a hazard. Stacks leaned like the tower in Pisa against the side of her dresser, against the wall beside her dresser, and had spread across the top of her dresser like weeds. Then there were those taking over her vanity table, the ones she’d started shoving under the bed, and others filling the drawers of the bureau that had been Artie’s.

  The new case she bought, the first of what she feared would be many to line the house’s long hall, meant rearranging her whole library—a collection of hardcovers and paperbacks and oversized art books in so many shapes it had taken her an entire weekend to sort them and shelve them, some staying in the living room, some remaining in the bedroom, some moving to their new home in the hall.

  It was while transferring the books from the bureau that she’d unearthed the Bible bequeathed to Artie by his maternal grandmother. The family heirloom had been in the bottom drawer of the makeshift storage space for years; she remembered leaving it there with several of Artie’s political thrillers when packing away some of his clothes.

  Finding it the way she had, sitting on the floor in front of the bureau as she’d done so often when folding her husband’s T-shirts and briefs . . . she’d been struck with myriad feelings, the most overwhelming being a sense of guilt. How had she been so remiss about keeping in touch with the members of his family since his death?

  Artie had visited Italy several times before they’d married. His maternal grandparents had lived in Vernazza; his mother had grown up there, moving to the States at nineteen, where she’d married his father, and where Artie was born.

  Artie had shared with Brooklyn his grandfather’s stories: of fishing and swimming and sailing, of the sun and the lush olive groves and vineyards, of the gardens and the blue-green water he and his friends had taken for granted growing up. He’d told her how his grandfather couldn’t wait until Artie, his namesake, his Arturo, was old enough to travel alone, to see it with his own eyes. To drink and breathe and relish the beauty of his Italy.

  After she and Artie married, they’d made the trip four times, giving her the chance to meet and grow to love Pops
and Zola before they’d passed on. Artie had wanted to visit more often. Instead, he’d put off his wishes while fulfilling hers, taking her to see One Tree Hill in Auckland, New Zealand, and the Royal Palace in Madrid. The Emerald Buddha in Bangkok, Thailand, and Norway’s Urnes Stave Church in Ornes.

  The memories made her feel so selfish. She loved Artie’s family, his grandmother, his grandfather, his many cousins and their spouses and children. Time with them would’ve been the greatest gift she could’ve given Artie, but having grown up in such a sheltered environment, she’d wanted to see the world, and Artie had happily given it to her.

  After running across the Bible, she’d e-mailed Bianca, Artie’s cousin she’d grown closest to. Their correspondence had become a daily thing. When she’d learned about the floods that had struck Vernazza and Monterosso three years before, Brooklyn had been horrified by her failure to check in with the family sooner. And when she learned about the local church losing nearly everything, she mentioned the Bible to Bianca.

  From there, the decision was made for her to bring the Bible with her when she visited in June. The village residents would be overjoyed to have it back in their midst. Talk had then turned to Brooklyn extending her visit, and staying to help Bianca with a new teaching initiative. Thinking now about those early days of planning her trip, the notes she’d jotted while researching housing and transportation . . .

  Leaving the files in the hope chest, she headed to the kitchen, where she’d left the bottle of wine she’d opened earlier. Picking up her phone, she glanced at the clock, calculated the time difference, then scrolled through her contact list and hit Talk.

  “Pronto?” came the answer less than thirty seconds later.

  “Bianca? It’s Brooklyn,” she said, sitting as she reached for her wine. “Did I wake you?”